Onto-Cartography

Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media is nearly complete. I conceive the relation between Onto-Cartography and The Democracy of Objects as the relation between the transcendental dialectic and the transcendental analytic. Where The Democracy of Objects explored being in terms of the constituent elements that make it up– objects, or what I’m now calling “machines” –Onto-Cartography explores relations or interactions between machines in worlds, assemblages, or networks (all three terms are synonymous). Part 1 develops a detailed ontology of machines and flows, departing in a number of respects from the theorizations of The Democracy of Objects. Above all, the concepts of entropy, work, and energy become far more important in this work. The world is a world in perpetual decay such that machines require energy to sustain themselves and must engage in constant operations or work to continue existing across time.

Part 2 is devoted the structure of worlds, investigating topological structures of space and time, the different types of objects that populate worlds (dark, bright, dim, rogue, black holes, and quasi-objects), questions of agency, the difference between happenings and events, the methodology of geophilosophy or onto-cartography, and the ethics and politics of onto-cartography. I still have one and a half chapters to write, so hopefully I’ll have the book to Edinburgh by the end of the month.

Next up will be The Domestication of Humans: The Nonhuman Infrastructure of Human Beings for the Posthumanities series with University of Minnesota Press. I apologize for my non-responsiveness to emails and comments lately. I’ve been madly writing 10 – 20 pages a day trying to complete this book.

Did not Foucault already engage in an onto-cartography by discerning the matrices of transformations that the heteregenous elements of a dispositif as coupled machines (architecture+law+discourse) assemble? Is not the order within a multiplicitiy, which is effectuated by this very dispositif, already a hint to what you discern as a gravitational path? In that case, you have to extend your democracy of the objects to anything that performs transformations, or to what Foucault in his earlier work, borrowed of Hyppolite, called ‘positivity’.